Wires and water, Delhi’s fatal combo (Indian Express 14 July 2010)

Old City under tangle of wires, but no one to tie them all in
A day after two persons were electrocuted at Dariba Kalan in Chandni Chowk, the civic agencies, the police and local traders are blaming each other for the deaths.
The traders claim the local police post “had been drawing electricity illegally by connecting wires to the streetlights. “The same wire fell off the nearby pole into the waterlogged street causing the incident around 8 pm on Monday.”
“Ramesh, a local vendor, came in contact with the wire and was electrocuted. Just then, amid the chaos, Ram Kishan, a resident of Karawal Nagar, who was wading through the waterlogged street with his bicycle, toppled over something and fell into the water. He too was electrocuted,” said the local traders who claimed to have witnessed the incident.
However, the police have rubbished the allegations, claiming an electric wire fell off a light pole in the area. “We received information about the incident at around 8.30 pm and immediately rushed to the spot. On preliminary investigation it was found that the wire had fallen off a central verge light pole,” said Palvinder Singh Chahal, Station House Officer, Kotwali Police Station.
Discom BSES Yamuna, which supplies power in the area, blamed the MCD saying the electrocution was caused by poor maintenance of the streelights.
The incident has once again highlighted the need to rid Old Delhi of its maze of loose over-head wiring. In fact, Fire department officials said 90 per cent of the fires in Old Delhi are triggered by such loose wires, when they come in contact with other structures. Though the fires are seldom big, they are frequent enough to constantly keep the residents and shopkeepers on their toes.
The BSES had submitted a proposal to Shahjahanabad Redevelopment Corporation in 2005 to use hi-tech equipment for micro-tunneling and trenching to move overhead high-tension and distribution wires underground. At the time, the MCD, planning to implement its Jama Masjid redevelopment plan, claimed this would interfere with its works. A year later, MCD too came up with a plan to shift all wires underground. Both BSES and MCD officials now claim “the overhead mess is constituted mainly by local cable television wires and work is on to shift the electric cables underground”. This January, the MCD issued a public notice asking all parties concerned to remove overhead cables from Chandni Chowk by February-end. Almost five months on, Old Delhi continues to host a tangle of cable TV and high-tension electric wires. The MCD has now started snapping overhead TV cables in many